


the light looks after you

by buckstiel



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Millennium Falcon - Freeform, Mission Fic, Mutual Pining, Post-Book: Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Post-Canon Fix-It, Pre-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rodia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21612655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: Rey and Rose find themselves stranded on Rodia in the middle of a clan feud while picking up repair parts for the Millennium Falcon.
Relationships: Rey/Rose Tico
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2019





	the light looks after you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [callmelyss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmelyss/gifts).



> this got away from me but i hope you enjoy it, callmelyss!! 
> 
> title from "the undertaking" by louise glück
> 
> thank u for the beta feraldanvers :*

It was supposed to be a kriffing _errand_.

After months of hopping from planet to planet, one ramshackle base to another after being chased off Ryloth, the Resistance had finally put its collective energy into setting up some place more permanent--a long-abandoned base on one of the few islands of Wrea where the majority of the work was hacking away at the overgrowth and resetting the security measures the previous tenant had already installed.

They should have predicted it, especially in the wake of the insect infestation on Utapau. The central command center up and running, the comm consoles whirring, casting General Organa and Poe’s faces in a hopeful light--but Threepio had to dodder in.

“It’s the _Millennium Falcon_ ,” he said hesitantly. “Some crucial part has blown to bits.”

Said crucial part, smoldering in the field that doubled as their hangar bay, held pieces of string, tape, and what looked like Corellian chewing gum amid its cracked and severed joints.

The circle gathered around it exchanged glances in silence.

“That ol’ reliable Solo engineering, huh?” Jessika said after a moment, kicking a corner with her boot.

Chewbacca grumbled. “He says there’s nothing he can do to fix it,” Rey translated. “We’re going to have to get a replacement.” Another roar. “Finally.”

And the Falcon being the technical piece of junk that it was, the part wasn’t something the shipyards out of Corellia still carried. Junk traders couldn’t guarantee they’d get anything like it in stock for months--years, even, this close to Wild Space. So when Poe and Suralinda tracked down a consignment shop on Rodia that had one still in the box, there was little question on what to do next.

“Rose, you’re our engineering chief. You have to make sure it’s legitimate… not to mention install it properly,” General Organa said at the briefing. “Rey, you accompany her. Rodian clan conflicts are unpredictable and dangerous, so she shouldn’t go alone. Chewie says he’s got enough of Han’s wires and… old gum… to get you there. I wish we didn’t have to send you in a failing ship, but--”

She didn’t have to finish the thought. Their fleet consisted of the Falcon and one very beat-up A-wing that was nowhere close to even firing up its engines.

So they left, following the Corellian run up past Ryloth and Arkanis until the jungle planet laid bright and green below them, the domed Equator City honed in on their navigator.

And when the engines started to fail in atmo, all Rose could say was, “Gum is _not_ an engineering tool!”

Shouted, more like. Over and over, just barely drowning out Rey’s repeated “ _I know!_ ” as she guided the smoking ship into the thick cover of trees, digging into the underbrush and mud as they skidded to a welcome halt.

“We’re not near the city, are we?” Rey said.

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

Slowly Rey tested all of her limbs--nothing broken, nothing bleeding either. She sighed, and that finally caught a bruised rib. “I was supposed to watch you beat Finn at dejarik tonight.”

“Still could,” Rose offered with a grin that quickly slipped into a grimace. Her thumb plugged a bleeding cut on her forehead as the other hand fiddled with settings on the dashboard. “We saw Equator City coming in. We can’t be _too_ far from it.”

Rey could only sigh.

“If the Force isn’t giving you any reason to be optimistic, then maybe not.”

“Let me grab you some bacta for that, at least.”

The _Falcon_ ’s primary cabin was littered with--the first word to come to Rey’s mind was _debris_ , but a half-second’s inspection was enough to see it was everything the rest of the Resistance had packed for them flung from whatever flimsily-secured cabinet they’d been stowed in. Emergency rations boxes were wrapped in weathered green-camo parkas, some mystery piece of equipment laid busted near a seat, and if she followed the trail of its loose screws and wires, she could spot Poe’s half-illegible scrawl on an old metal box.

Under _MEDKIT_ , he’d drawn an approximation of the first-aid symbol.

She didn’t have high hopes for the contents.

“This thing isn’t getting off the ground anytime soon,” Rose called from the cockpit, which faded into mumbling by the time Rey was back beside her, trying to squeeze the bacta onto the moving target of her forehead.

“Can you please keep still--”

“If we reworked the wiring around the dampeners--”

“Chewie and I already reworked that last week.” She finally caught Rose’s eye long enough for her to fall back in the copilot’s chair, the last bit of her thought held between her teeth. It was a look she’d seen often, watching Finn tell her some bad joke or riddle, or Threepio prattle on about the latest indignity at the hands of Kaydel’s analytics team, or a sudden storm wash away the paint job on a refurbished astromech.

Rey tried not to meet that look with a grin, instead tilting Rose’s head up with a finger under her chin so the bacta wouldn’t go sliding into her eyes.

“That was my only idea,” she sighed. “We’ll have to walk to the nearest settlement.”

“So we walk. Didn’t crash so badly that it knocked that out of contention, at least.” Rey pressed a swatch of bandage over the drying bacta, waited for Rose’s thumb to reach for it before letting go herself. She’d left her pack with her lightsaber and canteen back with the rest of the mess, and if she managed to forget them, Master Skywalker’s hand was likely to reach through the veil of death and conk her on the head.

“Grab your blaster,” she called back to Rose.

“It can’t be that bad of a hike. Suralinda said there’s no dangerous wildlife here.”

“Still.”

Rey slid back into the doorframe of the cockpit, Rose’s blaster in tow. It was larger than the holdout piece she’d come back with after Crait, requiring her arms’ full attention to lug it around, ideally in a cradle.

“How many sayings do they have in those Jedi books about being prepared?” Rose said with a quirk of a grin.

“Haven’t read them,” Rey said. She held the blaster before her until Rose took it. “Keep meaning to.”

“A Jakku thing, then?”

What it was about Jakku that started freezing Rey up, she wasn’t sure, but that didn’t keep it from happening all the same. The longer she stayed within the warm circle of the Resistance, with their cots and rations and ready communion at all hours of the day, the more the desert clawed at her insides. Half the time when she woke up in the morning, she expected to find herself in the gutted AT-AT she’d made her home, already caked salty with sweat before Unkar Plutt had a chance to scowl at her from behind his perch.

The longer she stayed away, the more unbelievable it became.

“Yeah,” she said. “Something like that.”

They descended the ramp onto the soft, loamy soil, the air around them already leaning close, like an unwanted hot breath hazing across the back of their necks in the dark. The sun was at its crest and dappled shadows from the treeline lay at their feet. For a rainforest, it was uncomfortably silent. With a name like that, Rey half expected for there to be some kind of constant dripping from the damp mess left behind from its namesake--but not even that rang through the brush.

Rose glanced around, squinted up at the sun, and after consulting her datapad, pointed toward a barely-there trail leading forward through the trees. It wove back behind the _Falcon_ to a more open clearing that they’d missed in the crash--so they had a trail. It could lead to Equator City. It was _something_.

Barely five minutes had passed before Rey’s arm wraps were soaked through. In the dry Jakku heat, they’d served to keep the sweat from dripping down her arms to whatever she was trying to salvage; here, every movement seemed to wring them harder until there were gross little pools collecting in her palms.

All the while, the terrain never changed.

“I think I may have miscalculated--” Rose started, and then the tree behind her burst into splinters, the hiss of burnt wood rising in its wake.

 _Snap-hiss_ \--the lightsaber glowed in front of her eyes, cutting a blue-white line through her view of the underbrush. “Who’s there?” she called. Her voice carried far enough to scatter a small collection of bright red birds. “Show yourself.”

There was a beat, and then a lanky Rodian emerged from behind one of the thicker bunches of tall ferns ahead, near where the trail bent toward the east. He had a short mohawk of blond hair growing amid the fronds between his antennae, green skin so dark that it was almost black. “Mighty big demands for someone intruding on Meekoy territory.”

Behind her, Rose muttered, “That blaster…” There were enough odd plug-ins and additions onto what was otherwise a standard piece to unnerve Rey without knowing what they did. Rose _did_ know--and was wary.

“We were trying to get to the city. Our ship crashed,” Rey said slowly. The Rodian’s eyes glittered in the light, the shimmer growing sharper as they narrowed with suspicion. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“If there’s a way to get to Equator City without trespassing, we’ll gladly take it,” Rose said.

The air around them only grew thicker in the silence, pressing in on all sides trying to squeeze as much out of them as it could manage; a couple stray beads of sweat rolled down Rey’s back as the Rodian continued to stare them down. The barrel of his blaster shifted between the two of them, narrowed on the blank spots between their eyes in turn.

Dull static prickled on the back of Rey’s neck, and before she was fully aware of it, she swung her lightsaber in front of Rose, catching the blaster bolt and flinging it back into a spindly palm tree, just missing the tip of the Rodian’s right ear, and then there was a tight grip on her wrist pulling her backwards.

“So much for taking the diplomatic route.” Rose only tightened her hold as she navigated the two of them through the woods, offering insistent tugs whenever Rey checked behind them. The crunch of the Rodian’s footfalls started to ease. “Obviously we need to rethink--”

 _Crack!_ \--three thick branches overhead snapped apart from their trees, crashing through the canopy still smouldering from blasterfire. Four more Rodian heads popped up around the underbrush, blasters and bowcasters and vibroswords drawn.

“Look,” Rose called, and still she hadn’t let Rey’s wrist go, her grasp tightening to the point it was starting to shake. “We’re leaving--”

“Tell Snugg Hatfeel to keep to his side of the river!”

“Who the kark is that?” Rey said before she could stop herself. Not half a moment later, the trail lit up with more blasterfire and the distinct snapping of twigs as more of the Meekoy Rodians rushed forward with vibroswords humming at full strength.

Rose got off a few key shots bolting back to the _Falcon_ , and Rey rendered useless any piece of weaponry that breached the arc she could swing with her lightsaber. Tips and entire chunks of vibroswords buried themselves in the dirt or the surrounding trees still standing amid the barrage.

Every few meters one of their pursuers still brandishing their ruined pieces jerked back and fell from Rose’s blaster fired over her shoulder, the aim redirected and honed with a precise nudge from the lightsaber. By the time they were scrambling up the _Falcon_ ’s boarding ramp, the layers of brush between them muted the remaining Meekoys’ hollered threats.

“Good call on bringing the blaster, by the way,” Rose said after she’d caught her breath. Her face was flushed, shiny from sweat--just as Rey’s must have been from the way it was burning--and she offered a sheepish grin when she realized she was still clamped onto Rey’s wrist.

“Would’ve rather been wrong.” She straightened up, pulled the soaked-through wraps from her arms. “Fewer complications.”

“Guess it’s time to figure out who Snugg Hatfeel is.”

*

Snugg Hatfeel, according to the wide berth of knowledge on the HoloNet, was a nobody. Basic searches directed them instead to Snugli Explevey, some low-level Corellian gangster, or Hat Lo, an Old Republic slaver--both long dead. They had no better luck digging up anything on the Meekoys, Rey’s indignant typing always managing to land on some shoddily-coded fan page for a Duros swoop gang leader.

“If I have to look at another glittery red background with autoplay cantina music--”

“All right, let’s switch.” Rose dropped a bucket of spare parts in her lap.

“I think I can get it this time. There’s got to be a way to remove all references to Duros--hey!”

“It’s my turn,” she said, bumping Rey’s shoulder with her hip. “I’ve hit a roadblock working on the nav computer, anyway.”

Sighing, Rey ceded the crate she’d used as a seat, hoisting the bucket to balance on her shoulder. “I hope the Force is more with you than it seemed to be with me.”

“The HoloNet doesn’t deal in the Force,” Rose called after her. “Trust me.”

She had to take her word for it, as much as Rey hated to admit. It wasn’t that she couldn’t figure out her way around a datapad or computer--the engineering and mechanic teams had tapped her more than once to help repair whatever engines or circuit boards they’d managed to salvage. That was intuitive. That made _sense_. No one around Niima Outpost had anything that could hook up to the HoloNet; if any one of her fellow scavengers had come up to her with tales of an electronic web of infinite information accessible from your own personal datapad, she would’ve told them to lay off the glitterstim.

And then there were all the bits of navigating it that were supposed to be common sense. Three bases before their current setup, she’d been digging for updates on the situation on Batuu and infected the whole Resistance’s network with a virus.

“There was a notification that said local women wanted to chat anonymously,” she’d told General Organa later. “And you were just saying yesterday how we needed new recruits!”

Finn had said, “I think that makes perfect sense,” but General Organa and Poe could only massage their temples.

Rose had been on a recon mission that day, which maybe explained why she didn’t keep Rey from HoloNet duty from the get-go.

The _Falcon_ ’s cockpit was even more of a wreck than usual when Rey slid inside, sidestepping panels Rose had pulled from the wall, balls of used electrical tape on their last legs, stray nuts and bolts and clothespins that had likely been jammed into the mechanical thicket Han had cultivated over the years, spilling out from their useless hidey holes at the first sign of disturbance.

In the middle of the exposed wiring was the screen of the ship’s nav computer, an ancient piece of tech when even the rest of the ship was only a year or two out from the shipyards. “The core of it is very powerful--also been modified,” Rose had said over lunch. “But the screen itself is next to useless. It can’t do detail, and it can’t display anything smaller than a star system. It’ll spit out coordinates to the pilot’s dashboard just fine, but if it’s going to help us navigate to Equator City, we need another way for it to communicate.”

Uploading the atlas of Rodia from Rose’s datapad was the only step they’d managed to figure out thus far.

“Okay…” Rey frowned at the nav screen, hands on her hips. “Is there any reason why you wouldn’t be able to talk to us in Basic?”

There was already a small section in the wall where the warning blips and bleeps aired, and if tinkering around Threepio’s circuitry after the Utapau incident had taught her anything, it was that droids’ language capabilities were more malleable than anyone wanted to admit.

(Threepio had been unable to communicate in anything but an archaic dialect of Mando’a for a week.)

So she set to work. With a wrench in her hand and her tongue held between her teeth, she could settle into a headspace narrowing to the single point of the mechanical puzzle before her. There wasn’t enough focus to spare to wish for Han’s grumbling assistance or worry about the Meekoys banging down their door. She didn’t have the space to even think too hard about Rose’s grip on her wrist, how reimagining it tightened her stomach the same way as when Jessika drunkenly fell asleep against her shoulder during Snap’s birthday party.

“Hey!” Rose called from the main cabin. “Did you know Rodians have suction cups on the ends of their fingers _and_ toes?”

“Making that much progress, are you?”

“The more we know, the better!”

Rey laughed under her breath. “Maybe not about Rodian feet,” she muttered.

She leaned back, taking a moment to look over her work as a whole; Rose’s bit of trivia had thrown off her concentration in rewiring the nav computer’s connection to the speaker, but she’d needed a break anyway. She tucked a few flyaways stuck to her forehead back behind her ear and tried to mentally map out the rest of the configurations, troubleshoot issues brought on by lack of supplies or Han’s special brand of engineering. A few minutes would go by, a potential solution approaching, and then she would remember the face Rose made watching General Organa when Poe was reprimanded for blowing a chunk of their repair budget on bright orange ship paint--or worse, she’d overhear her talking to herself in the HoloNet search, having gone down some rabbithole tangentially related to the task at hand.

Narrating her fascination with the exploits of Imperial-era Rodian outlaws or her excitement over the published memoirs of a Rodian dancer who’d had a stint in Jabba the Hutt’s palace--not everything was determined interesting enough to warrant a shout across the ship, but what did only further sent Rey’s stomach into knots.

_Did you know one of the Empire’s most wanted rebels before the Battle of Scarif was a Rodian former bounty hunter?_

_Did you know it was a Rodian Jedi that safeguarded the information about Force-sensitive kids?_

_Did you know that dancer with the memoirs was a member of a band called The Palpatones? Rey, the PALPATONES_.

After that first offering of trivia, Rey had returned to the wiring, where a clothespin and some gum-reinforced used electrical tape held everything in place--at the third recurrence of The Palpatones, which Rose understandably could not get enough of, Rey finally broke into laughter loud enough for the entire ship to hear. The hand holding the clamps slipped, completing the circuit, and over Rose’s listing of the group’s pun-filled discography, the nav computer came to life.

“Is this thing on? Oh blazes, it’s been ages, hasn’t it? I’ve finally got a voice again! Now tell me, where the kriff is Lando?”

*

L3-37 hadn’t properly voiced her opinion on anything in over forty years, and by Force she was going to do it now.

“No one ever asked me if I wanted to be saved this way, you know. It was that residual guilt. All about them! No, it’s fine, take the instigator of the Kessel Droid Uprising and embed her in ship predestined to end up in a junk heap. Makes sense.”

And five minutes later: “What do you mean there’s not any record of the Kessel Droid Uprising? I was there! It was the entire mining base--whatever, I don’t know why I thought organics would have gotten better about this. I could tell how they treated that little protocol unit around here.”

Rose frowned at that. “You like Threepio? Most people--”

“I didn’t say I liked him. No, not in a million years. He’s insufferable. Got into a couple arguments with me over the years but I dislike him from an equal footing, unlike all of you.”

“I don’t dislike him at all,” Rey said, but Elthree had already turned back around to Lando, asking a hundred questions about where he’d gotten off to after they were separated on Numidian Prime and another hundred about a list of topics neither Rey nor Rose had never heard of. The onslaught was so constant that eventually they were forced to excuse themselves back to the cabin, falling onto the bench around the dejarik table.

Elthree still got the last word in: “ _AND I WANT A BODY AGAIN!_ ”

Leaning back, Rose focused on a splotch on the ceiling, a gray patch of old engine oil or questionably nefarious mold marring the otherwise clean surface. At this angle, the tinge of blue under her eyes was unmistakable.

Rey plopped her forehead on Rose’s shoulder with a sigh--there was a moment before she realized what she’d done when Rose stiffened slightly, a figurative sock to the gut, and she righted herself so quickly she nearly flipped herself backward off the bench and onto the floor. “This complicates things.”

“What does?” Rose said quickly, focusing even harder on that ceiling spot.

“Elthree. For some reason I thought the _Falcon_ wouldn’t have such…”

“A personality?” She met Rey’s eye then, quirking a grin. “The boilers on the _Raddus_ were a snippy bunch, and they haven’t--hadn’t been through half as much as this thing has.”

Rose held her gaze long enough for Rey to smile back at her before turning to another corner of the cabin--this time, a corner closer to the entrance of the gun turret where a couple porgs had punched through the panelling with their teeth.She had a plan to help Elthree and contend with the larger Hatfeel-Meekoy issue, a plan she had to talk through to properly sort the various moving pieces into a larger machine.

So Rey listened. She could follow through half of it, but then Rose started to veer into the technical names for things, various theories and techniques that could only be picked up from a setting more suited for learning than the scalding sands of Jakku. Some parts sounded familiar, but it was enough to watch Rose mold invisible segments of tech through the air, squinting one eye shut and tilting her head while explaining the exact theorem she’d read about during one of Cobalt Squadron’s slower days or gotten a stranded pilot’s astromech to outline on Hays Minor.

(“You spend an awful lot of time around the--well, I can’t really call it a hangar.” Jessika sighed looking around the collection of nonfunctional ship parts and droids stuffed in an old gymnasium facility on the Roche asteroid Nickel-1. “You’re not even a pilot.”

Jessika Pava had many talents, one of which being a sarcastic sense of innocence so sharp it was a wonder no one ever bled from it. This time, she made an overly incredulous face, a hand coming to her chin--and all the while Rose laid under an A-wing, oil dripping onto her forehead and a wrench fighting an itch at her hairline.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rey said--would say every time--and Jessika would cackle however long it took her to head back toward the other end of the base. Maybe Rose would glance up from her current project to raise an eyebrow at Jessika, but maybe not. And it was always a good day when she did.)

“So it’s going to be tricky to get everything to interface with this Old-Republic-era junk, but she could be mobile by tomorrow night,” Rose said with the air of a conclusion. “At the latest.”

So they had a plan--part of one, at least. Rey’s spirits lifted as well as they could, still burdened with the mystery of the local skirmish they’d planted themselves in. With nothing on the HoloNet and Elthree not offering any knowledge on her end, navigating through the Hatfeel-Meekoy minefield would be a Force-guided shot in the dark.

Unless--

“Our coms are still online, right?” Rey said.

“Yes, but we don’t have any backup to send for--”

“That’s not it.” Rey turned to her with a grin that was ready to pull her face in two. “Remember what General Organa said before we left? About Rodian clan conflicts?”

Rose waited a moment for her to add something else. “She said they could be unpredictable. And she was right.”

“Exactly!” Rey jumped up, started pacing around the cabin, the scattered junk on the floor carving a path around her so well that she couldn’t be certain if it was the Force or just the jittery arcs of her legs. “If she knows that much about Rodia… I mean, what doesn’t General Organa know?”

Ten minutes later--having transferred the call to a portable device to avoid Elthree’s interjections--Rey and Rose sat before a flickering blue holo of Finn’s torso. “Are you sure everything’s okay with that droid?” he said. “You’re fine from the crash, but that’s not anyone who forced themself aboard is it--”

“Thank you for the worry, but she’s…” Rose grimaced searching for the right word. “She’s just her own person.”

“Hates Jakku as much as you do,” Rey said, and Finn seemed to loosen up.

A couple figures passed behind Finn in the holo, their bodies cut off at weird angles by the span of the camera--Poe offering a lingering hand at Finn’s shoulder, Klaud lumbering by with a rumbled _hello Rose_ , even some of the newer faces Rey hadn’t fully learned yet leaning in with a supportive wave.

“We need to talk to General Organa,” Rey said as the last of the passersby headed on their way. “There’s--”

“Look,” Rose said pinching the bridge of her nose. “You know how Bastian tried to step in between Suralinda and Karé’s wallball game--”

“Oh! Yeah, right--okay, I’ll be right back.”

He jumped out of frame, the only image left transmitting the rounded domes of astromechs bleeping to and from the tarmac.

“I think that was when you and Snap went to see Jas Emari,” Rose said. “The situation was...comparable.”

“How is a blood feud the same as some wallball rivalry?”

“Well,” Rose sighed. “You’ve never seen Suralinda play wallball. Add in Academy grudges…”

She didn’t elaborate any further. It was likely a story she’d told countless times before, the best parts having long lost their charm and fallen into use as a kind of shorthand. And of course Rey missed things--she was the only member of the Resistance who had any kind of proximity to the title of Jedi, the one they sent on reconnaissance and diplomatic missions when they needed to lend an extra bit of legitimacy to their cause.

Such missions were often. There was a lot to laugh at during Resistance-wide briefings that she didn’t quite understand. But the gulf never felt quite this wide.

(Sometimes, though, she wanted to joke about something she’d seen with the Lanai on Ahch-To, or some quirk of Master Skywalker’s--but either no one would understand or it would only serve to bring General Organa a deep-seated pain she couldn’t hide rippling across her face.)

When General Organa appeared in the holo before them, she was slightly out of breath; Threepio wobbled in behind her, muttering about being unable to keep up before she shushed him. Finn hovered in the space between them, crouched low enough that his face was still in frame.

“Landed right in the middle of a clan conflict, I take it,” she said. There was a datapad in her hands that she kept fiddling with, then handing it off to Finn to connect it to their comms system. “There’s some rough terrain out in Rodia’s rural areas… you’re not in Hohkee territory are you?”

Rose barely was able to shake her head before General Organa continued--“That’s what I thought. I’m patching in one of my old contacts into our call. He knows far more about Rodian politics than I do.”

The tech on Wrea wasn’t what anyone would call state of the art, so patching in a contact amounted to a holo within a holo, a blurry bust fitzing in and out between them and General Organa’s sharper lines. The hazy contact in question, as far as Rey and Rose could determine, was a male Zabrak around General Organa’s age, pale even through the blue tint of the holo, a boyish charm inherent in the way his face openly curled and folded around his emotions.

“Oh yeah,” he said. His voice was surprisingly deep for his mannerisms. “I’ve heard lots about the Meekoys and Hatfeels. Goes back a long time, from what I’ve been told. One of my--he wasn’t an uncle, but--anyway, he wrote a book about it. It was his first foray into non-fiction, you should check it out--”

General Organa cleared her throat--not in the way she would when Suralinda and Jessika would go at it during open briefings, but almost warmly.

“Right. Of course. Time-sensitive.”

Even with that acknowledgement, he wove the relevant information into an elaborate, winding tale, peppering in tales of his Rodian not-uncle’s research fieldwork as he deemed appropriate, finally arriving at the present era after a couple more pointed cues from General Organa’s corner.

“I hope that helps some,” she said after disconnecting with the Zabrak. “I can’t say how useful his intel is at times.”

“It’s better than what we had before,” Rose said, absently twirling a loose tress of hair. “And we can work with it.”

“Before you go, General,” Rey said. She fought off a grimace as General Organa’s eyebrows shot up her forehead, a hand clearly hovering over the button to disconnect the call. “Ah… just out of curiosity… nothing more… you were still trying to get in contact with another one of your Rebellion connections, right? A… Lando someone-or-other? Have you heard from him?”

On Wrea or the _Falcon_ , a pin could have dropped, shattering the enveloping silence so completely as to give the stowaway porgs a heart attack.

“That wasn’t…” General Organa sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. Beside her, Poe’s face slowly slid into frame, a curious glint to his eye. “It wasn’t necessarily public knowledge I was tracking him down.”

Rey’s face flushed. “I had no idea, I’m--”

“Of course you didn’t. It’s fine.” She glanced to her left, where Poe was about ready to fall into her shoulder, and shoved him back upright. “But I have a lead. He’s somewhere cruising on Pantolomin, as whole and healthy as one can be at this age.”

Something behind them in the cockpit of the _Falcon_ popped and hissed--Rey recognized it a moment later as the speaker straining to its maximum capacity.

“IF YOU KNOW WHERE HE IS,” Elthree’s voice rang out, “WHY DON’T YOU GO GET HIM ALREADY?”

General Organa’s eyes widened to the size of BB-8’s ocular port. “What in the _Force_ did you two do--”

“Got-to-go-sorry-General-bye!” Rey smacked the call to a close.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rose was trying to get her attention--subtly, a sort of leaning-in as Poe had tried and failed to do on Wrea, eventually adding in a scrunched nose and grimace, and then a hand wavering on whether or not it wanted to rest on her shoulder. Rey couldn’t look at her. Everything the Zabrak said was zipping around her head, the underlying beat of whatever emotion Elthree’s reveal had stoked in General Organa’s eyes.

“It’s probably fine, you know,” Rose said after a tense couple minutes.

“Right.”

“Elthree said she wanted a body, and I think I can pull something together…”

“Good.”

And then Rose’s hand finally landed on Rey’s shoulder, the warmth in her palm shooting all the way up her fingers and through the individual branches of her ribcage, pulling her eyes to meet Rose’s gaze, the gentle deep browns managing to both calm her pounding heart rate and threaten to send it into overdrive.

“You think you can get all that intel down into a workable map?”

“Yeah… yeah, of course,” Rey said, nodding. The nodding was good, gave her a reason to turn away from Rose and regain some semblance of control over her composure. “Might even come up with the start of a plan.”

*

What General Organa’s contact knew was often circumstantial and hearsay. What he could know for certain was this: the Hatfeel-Meekoy conflict stretched back far into the annals of Old Republic history, the inciting incident was lost to the contortions of rumor and gossip, and while the borders were hotly contested and ever-changing, certain issues rarely did. Lar’may Creek was the only division that remained consistent, a winding body of water that reduced to a dry rut in the soil at this time of year.

“That’s probably the line we crossed earlier,” Rey said, and Rose nodded.

The information the Zabrak had on the two clans’ key figures was rocky at best. Snugg Hatfeel was indeed the leader of his clan, too old to do much else than direct from their figurative war room. The Meekoy leader they’d encountered didn’t pop up on his radar.

“If they think we’re agents of the Hatfeel clan already, maybe that’s where we should start.” Rey glanced back over at Rose; they’d spread out datapads and whatever else on which they scratched notes in a circle around them as Rose tinkered with a pile of salvaged droid parts she’d found stashed in one of the _Falcon_ ’s hidden smuggling compartments. Most of it was older than they were, retired models of astromechs and specifically-tuned medical assistants and even a few dented pieces from the 5YQ line of protocol droids.

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” she said. She held up a 5YQ model hand in front of her face, squinting down the tip of the first finger. “This thing has… looks like a small blaster installed in a finger--”

“I want it. I want the blaster finger,” Elthree called from the cockpit. “Not being able to defend myself led to this situation in the first place--”

“All right, all right,” Rose laughed. “We’ll get you the blaster finger.”

Rey kept pouring over the notes in front of her. With the Zabrak’s lead, it was easier to sort through the mess of results on the HoloNet--one datapad had an image of Snugg Hatfeel posing with a signed record from the Max Rebo Band, another the text of a short treatise the late Meekoy matriarch had distributed in downtown Equator City two weeks before she was killed in a skirmish.

“I can’t make heads or tails of this essay,” Rey grumbled.

“And I can’t figure out how to get this hand Elthree wants to interface with the rest of what I’ve got.” Rose’s mouth scrunched to one side, and Rey tried not to blush. “I’ll trade you.”

They practically threw their problem components at each other, both hiding the grins that snuck onto their faces, however poorly. Rey’s hands went to work almost of their own accord, her focus secured by the hold of her teeth on her tongue; it was a complicated interface, problems born from the merging of Old Republic, Imperial, and current tech, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t managed to solve on Jakku on a short-portioned afternoon.

After a few minutes, the path forward was fully familiar and Rose had begun to mutter to herself, bits and pieces of points summarized from the Meekoy tract, some half-verbalized commentary; and when Rey probed just an inch to share her thoughts, they burst forth in a flood. “Sa’gey Meekoy connected the aims of the Old Republic senator Onaconda Farr with the current situation--or at least as it was ten years ago. The Meekoy clan has repeatedly expressed fear over the growing threat of the First Order, and it seems the Hatfeels supported something along the lines of a new, theoretical Confederation of Independent Systems since they were wary of the New Republic.”

Most of this went over Rey’s head.

“Unkar Plutt didn’t give history lessons,” she said, rearranging bits of wire in what would be Elthree’s new elbow. In her peripheral vision, she could see Rose grinning, running a hand through her bangs, and she almost connected the wrong ends of a circuit because of it.

“Fair enough. What it means is neither side was really keen on the New Republic. The Hatfeels didn’t want anything to do with them, and the Meekoys didn’t think they were doing enough about the First Order. And what’s the Resistance but a good alternative?”

Rey’s eyes shot up from the droid parts in her hands. “We could negotiate with either side.”

“Exactly.” Rose’s grin curled further up her face. “And in the end, we could recruit both.”

“That might be getting a little ahead of ourselves.” Rey twisted behind her, patting amid the strewn tools and parts for the right size of wrench. “The Meekoys may not give us enough time to say anything before trying to kill us, and if they’re still fighting each other when they have this much in common politically--”

When she turned back around, wrench in hand, Rose was crouched where the Elthree’s body had been--right in front of her, inches from the tip of her nose, and she finally understood what Finn and Kaydel had meant when she overheard them outside her bunk late one night.

(“Teza Nasz is grumpy most of the time and even she wasn’t immune to it,” Finn said.

“Kriff, really? That’s so funny,” Kaydel snorted. “But you’re right. I’m pretty sure if someone found a way to infuse Rose’s excited face into bacta, they’d cure depression.”)

So maybe Rey hadn’t spent as much time around Rose as she would have liked, missing the dejarik tournaments for meditation practice or getting shunted off to missions on opposite ends of the sector or simply not knowing what to do with the rock in the pit of her stomach when she spotted her across the base, mistaking it for the anxiety that came from being thrust from abject solitude into a bustling crowd. So maybe she’d missed an opportunity to see firsthand what Finn and Kaydel had been discussing, but she was sure she had it now. Every part of her was alight, radiating a buzzing warmth that Rey couldn’t be sure wasn’t coming from the Force itself.

“I mean, maybe! But if we can talk to the Hatfeels, that’s still something. If--whoa.” Rose wobbled in her crouch and latched both hands onto Rey’s shoulders for balance, and Rey couldn’t help but think of the cave on Ahch-To, the magnetism drawing her in, bathed in light instead of a dank pall of fear. “If anything, we’ll be able to get to the city and find the part we need. And who knows? If both clans like what we say, we don’t have to make them work together.”

There was a beat, and suddenly Rey was aware that she needed to actually respond instead of fighting her gaze drifting to Rose’s mouth. First a quick nod, then spluttering out a couple _yeah_ s and _you’re right_ s, and then she was gingerly taking the nearly-complete droid body from Rose’s grasp.

“Once I get these arms secure, we can slot on the head and load her up,” Rey said after a few moments.

“Fantastic!” Elthree called from the cockpit. “ _So_ glad you’re done flirting and can get back to righting the wrongs of your fellow organics.”

“We what?” Rose’s voice nearly broke into a squeak.

“ _Please_ hurry up. The sooner we get through here, the sooner you can take me back to Lando. He’s got quite an earful coming. I wonder if he’s still in love with me…”

Rey glanced up from the two sets of pliers she was considering and found Rose’s eye almost on instinct; she hesitated looking away, a brief moment of boldness that left her wondering exactly how far the borders stretched in the realm of possibility.

*

Elthree’s new body had none of the symmetry or thoughtful design of the old one that had gone to ruin on Kessel. There hadn’t been much by way of material to fashion bipedal legs, but there were two rectangonal wheel treads from some late Imperial-era manufacturing droid. The arms had limited reach and mismatched hands, one the 5YQ model with the finger blaster, the other a jerky three-pronged claw grip with chipped electric-purple paint. A prototype BB-unit head dome swiveled on a short neck piece with its beeping vocal box replaced by a knot of circuits and wires Rose pulled out of the paneling by the _Falcon_ ’s nav computer.

“I’m hideous, but I’m mobile,” Elthree said, zipping around their feet in the main cabin. “A suitable compromise.” She came to a stop just before running over Rose’s toes. “Thank you.”

Rey grinned down at the blinking ocular port. “So--”

“Right. We better get on with it, then. Haven’t got all day.”

With the Rodia atlas loaded into her databanks and the information from General Organa, Elthree confidently led them in the opposite direction they had taken on their first trek out--hidden behind a line of close-set ferns and shrubs was a well-worn path winding almost nonsensically around trees that seemed to grow more stubborn in their places the further they ventured forth. As the trunks thickened, the sharper the veering turns of the path became until Rey could only assume the trees were their own breed of monumental, that ducking out of the way was the only means to assure safe passage.

More than anything, the quiet pinched at her nerves. If they were encroaching on Hatfeel territory as outsiders, surely they would have been shot at by now. That they hadn’t could only be a sign of impending trouble, a build-up to something worse than they encountered at the hands of the Meekoy.

While Rose hadn’t said anything of the sort, the hand held at her holster was indication enough that the same worries were running in circles around her head. Part of Rey wanted to keep her lightsaber drawn, ready--but in this silence, its hum would be as loud as the screech of a TIE fighter, and what good was a half-second advantage in the long run, anyway?

“I’m not sure stealth is really the way to go with this one.” Elthree spoke at full-volume, unfazed, though Rey wasn’t sure droids had much choice in the matter. (How many times had she heard Threepio hushed since leaving Crait?)

“Elthree--” Rose hissed.

“You don’t want them to think this is an ambush, do you?” She waited for a response. “That’s what I thought.”

Rose turned back to Rey with a grimace, which she could only answer with a shrug.

“She’s got a point,” Rose whispered. And she steadied herself, Rey could recognize the motions, and after a moment she caught Rey’s eye again--not grinning, necessarily, but poised, ready for whatever series of events would come rolling after the next step she took.

“HEY,” Rose shouted. “We’re with the Resistance and we want to talk to Snugg Hatfeel!”

A couple birds fluttered through the underbrush, twigs snapping under their feet until it all settled back into the silence they’d had before--or, not that exact silence, but one frothed with anticipation, ready to break again at any moment. Rey’s muscles tensed, and she watched Rose dig the ball of her right foot into the dirt as an anchor, Elthree swiveling her head to stare in some unreadable emotion.

“We’re not with the New Republic! We just want to talk!”

No birds flew for cover this time, but something in the underbrush rustled, eventually revealing a Rodian with golden skin burnt mud-red along the edges of her face and limbs, white-blond hair braided through the fronds between her antennae all the way down her back. Her long fingers hovered over the holster of a blaster.

“Pretty heavily armed for just wanting a conversation.”

“Some prefer to shoot first and ask questions never,” Rey said. “We’d rather not be sitting mynocks.”

The Rodian’s large eyes fell to her hip, where the lightsaber hilt was tucked against her hip. “The ‘Resistance’?” The air quotes hung heavy in her tone. “You’re not some weird Imperial fanatics--”

“Kriff, absolutely not!” Rose held up her hands. “We’re resisting the First Order. The New Republic knew about us, but we weren’t sanctioned by them at all. I mean…” She grimaced, motioning as if to refer to a planetary system that no longer existed.

Rey knew little about Rodians--they weren’t a species that frequented Jakku, much less lived there long term, and what she’d heard was gossip more than anything, often about people long dead and moot in the greater coming arc of the galaxy. There wasn’t a Rodian in the Resistance she could chat with over meals to get a sense of their body language. So as the Hatfeel studied them, her snoot moving this way and that, the only action Rey’s body could insist on was _flight_ , and _now_.

But she held her ground, kept her hand from twitching toward her lightsaber when the Rodian’s thin tongue poked thoughtfully at the corner of her mouth with what seemed like a glare.

“Fine,” the Rodian said. “I’ll take you to Snugg. You try anything, though--”

“We won’t,” Rose said quickly.

“They’re not that stupid.” Elthree wriggled in some approximation of a huff, her new arms clanking about like they were trying to cross and make a point.

“We’re not stupid at all, thank you very much,” Rose said.

“Right.” The Rodian cast a long gaze between the three of them. “We’ll see.”

Despite the air of mistrust around her, she took them at their word enough to walk ahead of them, back turned to the weapons at their hips--or, in Elthree’s case, in their finger. The trust didn’t extend to polite conversation, however; Rose asked after her name, if the bright blue scarf tied around her waist was local, if the weather was always this hot. Each time, the Rodian acted as if they weren’t even there.

The tension was as palpable as the humid air sticking to their faces, and Rose’s frustration beaded onto her face, her hands flexing into fists and back again.

Rey hissed under her breath to get her attention. “We’re all right,” she mouthed, and Rose’s mouth twisted up that implied she appreciated the sentiment, even if she didn’t believe it. “Trust me,” she mouthed again.

Before she realized what she was doing, Rey reached for her, hand landing around her elbow in a reassuring squeeze. It was as if someone had suddenly turned up the dial on the sun, a dizzying heat flashing up Rey’s hand, wrapping around her wrist, shooting up her arm as she felt her face flush. _It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine_ \--the mantra ran over and over in her head.

Her hand dropped from Rose’s arm--almost. Almost, because Rose caught it with her own, holding it there. Not letting go. And Rey waited for the squeeze, the release, staring Rose straight in the eyes because something told her if she glanced down at their hands braced there together that it would have to end. Rose only smiled, wide and dimpling, and then they were at the edge of the Hatfeel settlement.

The sudden arrival jerked them apart, sent them tapping against belts and pockets to be sure none of their resources or weapons had fallen into the dirt on the trek over. Elthree grumbled at the sight, her voice box warbling in overly-electronic cracks more suited to museum-aged models. “Really interesting multitasking, ladies,” she said, trekking ahead to the Rodian’s side.

“Andeel, that is _not_ a karking crate of power packs!” a voice called from the closest building. A few other heads turned from what they were doing: a circle picking apart old blasters, a pair of older women fussing over bread in an open oven, a couple children tossing around a grav-ball. They glanced at Andeel, then to Rey and Rose and Elthree, and back to the building where the voice came from. A couple metallic crashes followed a nasty bit of shattering glass and cursing in what sounded like Huttese.

Finally a Rodian emerged, halfway hopping on one foot before shifting into a careful limp. His skin was closer to a green-grey and he had no hair to speak of aside from the fronds running to the back of his skull. Under the patch on his left eye, a pale slash of scar tissue ran from ear to snoot. “I did hit my head pretty bad in there,” he said, “but those are definitely humans, not ammo.”

“I’ll get you your kriffing power packs,” Andeel said. “They want to talk to Snugg.”

“Oh, they want to talk to Snugg? Well, if that’s it! Of course, let’s just let them on in if all they want is to talk to Snugg! Golly, someone should let the Meekoys and the Grand Protector know how easy it actually is to get an audience--”

“Shut up, Enlom. The taller one has a lightsaber.”

Enlom’s one eye fell on Rey like a boulder and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. No mention of the Resistance--but her lightsaber was what warranted comment? Too many times since their time on Ryloth had Rey and General Organa found potential allies to be little more than Jedi fetishists, their commitment to the fight against the First Order dependent on their proximity to a lightsaber and the latest Force stunt.

Enlom’s hand twitched toward the small of his back, and in the Force Rey saw his hand return there, drawing a shiny retro-model blaster and firing straight at the middle of her forehead. When his hand moved again, her lightsaber deflected the bolt into the building’s roof with ease. Gasps among the spectators rose over the blade’s low hum.

“Yeah!” Elthree whooped at her feet. “Try that again, tough guy! You’re no match for--”

“Just go get Snugg,” Andeel sighed.

Enlom didn’t put up much more of a fight. A few minutes later, Andeel led them deeper into the village to the largest building they’d seen so far--it rose higher above the shops and homes around it by twofold, flowers lining the steps that led up to a wraparound porch and an entryway whose door was a thick piece of cloth the same color blue as the scarf Andeel wore on her waist. Inside, Snugg sat on a cushion behind a low table, one hand gripped around the head of an ornate cane laid across his lap, the other rubbing along the bottom of a drooping antenna. Wrinkles accentuated the Rodian’s natural bumpy skin, and a few fronds had started to shift from a rich emerald green to silver.

“So.” Snugg spoke with the end of an unlit pipe tucked into his snoot. “Two human women and a droid walk into the middle of the Tyrius Sector’s oldest turf war. What’s the punchline?”

They’d both been part of a fair share of tense negotiations, but none of those parties on the opposite side of the table had confronted them with anything close to humor. They didn’t dare break eye contact. Elthree didn’t impatiently roll back and forth on her treads.

Snugg snorted, and Rey felt the tension along her shoulders ease. “If you’d had an answer for me, I would’ve suspected you graduated from the Revwien Comedy Academy, and I don’t trust anyone that did. But don’t take that to mean you’ve gained my trust already,” he said, fighting off a cough. “I just don’t like funny guys.”

“Right,” Rose said. “Of course. Who would?”

“Not us,” Rey added quickly. “Humor is the worst.”

His snoot wriggled in a way that probably meant something to anyone familiar with Rodians, and Rey’s gut wasn’t feeling optimistic. “Out with it, then. It’s not every day we let outsiders into our village.”

The first negotiation that General Organa had put her in charge of took place at a campground on Phindar far from any formal settlements, bald patches dotting the area where vegetation refused to grow, scored by blasterfire and whatever else the Empire had at its disposal at that point in history. When Rey was there, backed up only by the lightsaber held obviously at her hip and Teza Nasz looming behind her, the weather had turned the field into mud, and she felt herself sinking trying to convey to the Phindians that the First Order held the threat of history repeating before the dust truly had time to settle--the muck slithered up to her ankles and her carefully-rehearsed speech on the Empire’s staying presence in the galaxy suffocated in it all.

She felt it again now, the thick heaviness clouding her vision. How could she speak on the reincarnated Empire when she’d only seen its skeletons, immobile and already half-buried?

“At the very least, we only need passage to Equator City and back to our ship,” Rose said, her words two steps away from tripping over themselves. “We’re with the Resistance. The New Republic didn’t want to take direct action against the First Order, but the Resistance did. And after Hosnian Prime…” Rose’s hand drifted to the pendant she wore, her thumb rubbing along the bottom curve.

“There’s always groups wanting to take action against the latest threat to galactic peace.” Snugg dug the tip of his cane into the floor, stretching his arm up high to keep his grip on the other end. “But that’s offering a bandage for a wound that shouldn’t have been inflicted in the first place. The New Republic’s gone. That’s reality. What’s the alternative when we reject the First Order? This isn’t a galaxy where one planet can survive wholly on its own anymore.”

“You don’t just roll over,” Rose said. “I grew up on a planet that had rolled over for them. It wasn’t on its own, but I could never call that ‘surviving.’”

“And the alternative you’re looking for…” Rey sighed. “It’s the Resistance. The New Republic came out of the rebellion. We can try again--”

“You.” Snugg leaned forward, waggling a long suction-cupped finger in her direction. “I want to know about you. Anyone holding a lightsaber in this day and age comes with a story in their other hand.”

“There’s… there’s not much to tell, really--”

And at that, Rose burst into the must undiplomatic laughter Rey’s ever heard--and Snugg too, from the way he jumped back from the table. “Not much to tell, _okay_.” She wiped a tear from her eye and forcibly regained composure. “I’m sorry, but that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” She caught Rey’s eye, held it, smiled at her in a way that didn’t require her face splitting apart for anyone else to see; and almost as soon as the weight of that settled into Rey’s hands, Rose faced back toward Snugg, voice low like she was sharing classified intel with an uncleared party. “You’ll hear it one day when someone thinks they’re only telling a legend.”

Rey blushed, face hot enough to break into a sweat even out of the glaring heat of the sun, and the responses from Snugg and Elthree faded into the background, distorted. What Rose said didn’t feel right even though she knew the objective facts of her life would side with what she said--a nobody left on a nowhere planet having held her own against the biggest somebodies in the galaxy, Skywalkers and red crackling lightsabers the other Jakku scavengers would relay to the smaller children like ghost stories.

Most days, she felt more like a ghost story than a legend. _Watch out, or else you’ll be thrust into the middle of something you could hardly begin to understand._

“The fact remains,” Snugg said, suddenly clear to Rey’s ears, “that there’s no guarantee this Resistance of yours will bring about anything better than the New Republic, much less anything as effective. Committing our resources to your cause is simply not worth the risk.”

Rose’s hands flexed into fists and back again, over and over under the table, and Rey couldn’t bring herself to lay her own hands there to calm the storm under the skin. “Don’t you have any hope--"

“You try fighting a multi-generational clan feud,” Snugg said. “Then come talking to me about the so-called power of hope.”

*

In the end, the Hatfeels didn’t abandon them completely. They got an escort--two, in fact, Andeel and Enlom, who argued the whole trek through the underbrush, led by their own intuition about the possible Meekoy traps laid amid the trees and Elthree’s algorithms. The most they encountered before the dome of Equator City loomed before them was a pair of errant ghests crossing their paths, but Andeel’s reflexes left the air around them buzzing amid the smoke curling from the ghests’ temples.

They didn’t accompany them into the city itself, but Rey never expected them to. Elthree was able to reroute them when it turned out the junk trader with the parts they needed had to relocate, switch alleyways to avoid detection from whatever organization was targeting them this time; and within a few hours the three of them were hiking back to the _Millennium Falcon_ , skirting the edge of Meekoy territory but keeping a hand near their weapons all the same.

“It’ll take about three hours to get the new parts installed,” Rose said after an hour of plodding through silence. “Then it’s back to Wrea.”

“You’ll be gentle, won’t you? The ship is sensitive.” Elthree kept rolling forward but swiveled her head piece back toward Rose. “I don’t want to hear her whining the next time I have to connect for diagnostics.”

Elthree remained a safe barrier between them--leading the way, but remaining close enough that if they were to walk too near each other at the center of the path, they’d risk stepping on her treads or kicking her into the knotted underbrush, never to be seen again. Rey couldn’t decide if she resented the droid for it or not. Rose had held her hand on the way to the Hatfeel settlement, had described her with a sense of reverence she could never see herself carrying, living up to. Deserving. Rose, she could live up to it. She jumped toward heroics without a lightsaber or Luke Skywalker’s lessons burying themselves in her head. The death of her sister hadn’t relegated her to the sidelines for good.

Before long, they arrived back at the clearing--Elthree traipsed up the ramp into the belly of the ship, leaving the two of them to stare up at the whole of it, the panels burnt from blasterfire and the heat of entering atmo, dents from asteroids and debris, the kind of history that no one ever bothered to record for posterity. They stared, and Rey forced herself to keep breathing over the weight that had settled over her lungs, until finally she found herself saying--

“I don’t feel like a legend, you know.”

“Not sure anyone does, in the moment,” Rose said. “Not that I would know.”

“You ought to, one day.”

Rose laughed to herself, quiet, under her breath. “Sure.”

“No, really!”

Rey thought to the stories Finn told her from Canto Bight, how they kneeled on the _Supremacy_ with an expectation to die and sprint amid fire and ruin knowing they could live and had to, all while Paige’s death was bright and raw. Those were the kinds of feats attributed to General Organa in her youth, the resilience that kept on amid the rubble of a planet turned to rubble.

Surely there was a difference between the fate hoisted upon Rey, the kind she ran from at the onset, and the fate Rose chased after, could have avoided if she tried. Both paths led them to this spot before the _Falcon_ ’s on-ramp, and the enormity of each step Rose took to land her here towered above Rey like the old tree on Ahch-To.

Even if Rey tried to run from the Force at first, she didn’t have to start off running from everything.

“You ought to now.” Rey took both her hands and leaned forward to kiss her, missing, landing on her nose. “Wait--”

Rose laughed under her breath, stealing a glance at her hands, which Rey still held with a vise-like grip even as she had leaned back far enough to rock back on her heels.. “Okay.”

“Okay?"

“You said to wait, so…”

“Right,” she said, nodding. “Right.” She leaned in again, landing square against Rose’s lips, their hands untangling to find holds elsewhere--Rey’s fingers curling around Rose’s belt loops as she felt tugging at each of her buns, short nails raking gently against her scalp. She sighed into Rose’s mouth, got a whimper back as Rose pushed her back against one of the on-ramp’s pistons. Dirty metal dug into her shoulder blades but it was a far-off thought with Rose’s soft skin under her hands, Rose’s tongue pressing against the pulse point in her neck, Rose--

“Good gracious, you two. Can’t you see we have a visitor?” Elthree rolled down the ramp to prod both of their ankles with her blaster-equipped hand. “You’ll have to excuse them,” she said, spinning her head around to the visitor in question.

Andeel’s mouth was pursed into a tight frown, arms crossed. “It’s fine,” she said, clearly bored.

Relief flooded through Rey’s whole chest as she and Rose pulled apart, and in glancing at Andeel’s immaculate blonde braid drooped over her shoulder, the loose, incongruent set of her own hair was suddenly all she could focus on. And there were too many knots to casually let it down.

(For a moment, she was grateful that Jessika and Suralinda weren’t there to take in the scene, revel in it to regale others later; but it was a brief moment, as she didn’t expect Elthree was the type to keep her vocal box quiet.)

“Is there something else we can help you with?” For someone with a shirt that rumpled, Rose sounded incredibly put-together.

Andeel held up a finger and whistled over her shoulder into the jungle. Twigs snapped, growing louder, until another Rodian emerged from the Meekoy side of the _Falcon_ ’s clearing--one of the adversaries with the dark green skin they had retreated from earlier. He had a bowcaster strapped to his back and a sharp mohawk of purple hair reaching high above his antennae with dull brown showing at the roots.

“This is Ba’zel Meekoy,” Andeel said, thumbing toward him. “He’s not an idiot.”

“Always good to hear,” Rey said lightly, and Ba’zel waved.

“Look,” Andeel sighed. “This feud--it is what it is. But the galaxy is bigger than this. Ba’zel thinks so too, and so do a handful of others on both sides of this thing. We can actually hold a civil conversation with each other, unlike our elders.”

Ba’zel looked like he was about to add something--which Andeel probably sensed, as she continued with a tad more gusto. “We just want to see what this Resistance thing is about. And look, I might not actually like him or any of his cousins, but I can get over it if it helps keep the Hosnian catastrophe from happening again.”

Excitement rattled through Rose at such a burst that the Force rippled with it. “That’s so great to hear!” she said, shoes squirming against the soil. “Elthree, can you take them up to discuss this further with General Organa, please?”

And if Elthree was going to protest, the _please_ disarmed her, and she motioned with her blasterless arm up the ramp for the two Rodians to follow. “C’mon, c’mon, rebellion waits for no one,” she warbled, continuing on until the ship muffled the specifics and Andeel was finally able to get Ba’zel to stop excitedly whispering to her about _the real General Organa_ and how no one mentioned that was part of the deal.

Without them, even with the ambient noise of the jungle, the quiet landed heavily at their feet.

“You’ve got a…” Rose pointed at one of the many flyaways in Rey’s frazzled hair.

“I mean,” she shrugged, “so do you.”

Rose laughed, a full belly-laugh that threw her head back even as she caught Rey’s hips, pulled her close to press a kiss where her neck met her shoulder. She sighed as Rey draped her arms over her shoulders. “We get the part installed, we get back to Wrea…”

“We bring along some new friends…”

Rose leaned back far enough to catch Rey’s eye, and the glint there held a wariness, like she was ready at any moment for the wonderful discovery in her hand to suddenly bite and scratch and sting. “You know…” she said. “I think we might actually win this thing.”

“Andeel and Ba’zel giving you a good feeling?”

“A great feeling,” she said, reaching up on her tip-toes to kiss Rey properly. “The _best_ feeling.”

Distantly, Rey could hear the holocall between the Rodians and General Organa, an even cadence of conversation that was leaning toward a favorable outcome; and closer was Rose. Rose, with the hands that held Rey against her and guided feuding parties to the same side. _Rose_ , with the endless font of hope.


End file.
